When they were at the height of their popularity, members of the Korean boy band H.O.T. began to suspect their golden fame was dross. The contracts they had signed with production house SM Entertainment called for each band member to receive royalties of less than 1 for every CD sold; members of other groups were getting 17. Arithmetic revealed the ugly truth: whenever one of their albums reached the magic 1 million-copies-sold milestone, each H.O.T. member could count on payment totaling a paltry $10,000. Heck, U.S. pop diva Mariah Carey earlier this year was paid $28 million by music label EMI...